An Afghan’s odyssey I In the Sea There are Crocodiles by Fabio GedaI

At the age of 10, Enaiatollah Akbari sets out with his mother from his village Nava, in Afghanistan. After a perilous journey, they arrive in Quetta, Pakistan. She makes him swear three things: Never to use drugs; never to use weapons; never to cheat or steal.
This advice is all he has when his mother leaves in the quiet of the night to return to her other children back in Nava.

With most of the odds against him, chances of Enaitollah’s survival in a new, hostile country are bleak. But he survives to tell his poignant tale. The story is told by Fabio Geda as a series of conversations with Enaitollah. These conversations between the author and the protagonist are spread through the narrative. Written in Italian, the book has been translated into English by Howard Curtis.

Abandoned in Quetta, Enait picks up odd manual jobs. Even when he is reduced to a mere street urchin, he misses his days at school and Buzul Bazi, a dice game played a bone taken from a sheep’s foot after it’s been boiled. He listens to the children playing during school recess, longing to join them but is forced to go out into a world where a simple request for water elicits a scathing reply: First tell who are you? Are you a Shia or a Muslim. By now Eniat has learnt his lessons as he shoots back, "First I am a Shia, then I am a Muslim. Or rather, first I am a Hazara, then Shia then a Muslim." Hazara, inhabitants of Ghazni province, are identified by their almond eyes and flatter noses. While some claim to be descendants of Genghis Khan’s army others claim to have come down from Koshans, the legendary builders of the Bamiyan Buddhas. "Some others say we’re saves and treat us like slaves," says Enaitollah. Fed up of being treated badly, he decides to go to Iran, where he had heard "things were much better". Here begins  Eniat’s association with people traffickers, cramped trucks and the constant fear of Telisia and Sang Safid, the immigrant detention centres. At the Iranian city of Isfahan, he picks up the job at a construction site, which is where most of the illegal migrants worked. But with the constant police raids and the sword of deportation hanging on his head, Eniat decides to move again; this time to Turkey. This journey is far more challenging than anything he had been through. From Salmas, the last city in Iran and
closest to the mountains, begins a 27-day trek across snow-capped mountains.

On arriving in Istanbul, it becomes clear that there was no work to be found there. A journey further ahead to Greece is imminent. Here ensues a voyage in a dinghy which ends in his landing at a Greek port town without any clothes. The journey to Mytilene and thereon to Rome is largely aided by kind-hearted people. Enaitollah’s tale is a real-life account not a fictionalised narrative. His journey, that spans from Nava to Turin, may bring to mind the century-old adventures of Kipling’s Kim. This is however a much more realistic account pared of all the romance of adventure and powered by the sole grit to survive. Enaitollah refuses to name most of the people and places. "Facts are important," he tells Fabio, "The story is important. It’s what happens to you that change your life, not where or who with." While debating if they should take the journey to Greece in a dinghy, a fellow Afghan mentions the threat of crocodiles in the sea. The only answer available at that time to the group of young boys in desperate search of a better life is that there are no crocodiles in the sea. A postscript to the novel notes that Eniat, who is now 22 years old, and has received asylum in Italy, has discovered that there really are crocodiles in the sea.